"Defining Deviancy Down": How Senator Moynihan's
Misleading Phrase About Criminal Justice Is Rapidly
Being Incorporated Into Popular Culture *

Andrew Karmen **
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The City University of New York

ABSTRACT

"Defining deviancy down," the catchy
alliteration coined by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(D., N.Y.) is the 1990s equivalent of "permissiveness"
in political rhetoric about crime and criminal justice.
The term implies that the problem is public tolerance
of intolerable behavior and that the solution is
resurrecting traditional standards by stepping up
repression of underclass conduct. But this critique
sidesteps the possibility that some activities formerly
considered deviant which are now widely accepted were
unjustly stigmatized in the past. Also totally ignored
is the opposite tendency of "defining deviancy up," in
the sense that deviant behavior that went unpunished in
the past is now subject to penalties. Police brutality,
hate crimes, date rapes, wife-beating, child abuse,
indiscriminate corporal punishment, and other
depredations by persons of greater power and privilege
against people of lesser status are no longer
considered acceptable. A recognition that the balance
of power has shifted in a more egalitarian direction
corrects Moynihan's one-sided and negative depiction
that standards of conduct in American society have
drifted downward in the last generation.

-----------------------------------------* This article is a revision of a paper delivered at
the meeting of the Northeast Association Of Criminal
Justice Sciences in Newport, Rhode Island, June 1994.

** Dr. Andrew Karmen is an associate professor in the
sociology department of John Jay College of Criminal
Justice. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from
Columbia University in 1977. He is the author of Crime
Victims: An Introduction To Victimology, 2nd Edition(Wadsworth, 1990) and has written articles about
victims, auto theft, vigilantism, drug abuse, police
use of deadly force, and the 1950 Rosenberg atom spy
case. [End page 99]

"Defining deviancy down," the clever alliteration
coined by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.),
is rapidly becoming part of the political rhetoric
heard in discussions that are currently raging about
the crime problem. Moynihan's phrase is catching on
quickly, and will surely appear in textbooks for
courses in Introduction To Criminal Justice, Deviance,
and Criminology. Soon, students and faculty will be
employing the term in freewheeling debates in college
classrooms. Clearly, the Senator has struck a
responsive chord in some circles. Leading commentators
are giving him credit for coming up with an expression
that captures the essence of one of the most disturbing
trends in the United States today, the decline in the
"quality of life," due in large part to the cancerous
spread of the crime problem.

The rapid incorporation of this phrase into
popular culture is an unfortunate development. The
cynical, pessimistic, and anxiety-ridden spirit of the
1990s accounts for its glib acceptance. "Defining
deviancy down" is a seductive expression that
masquerades as a self-evident, uncontestable truism,
but it is actually a loaded phrase with severe
limitations. Although it contains a kernel of truth,
the insights come packaged with a highly politicized
coating. The expression is not intended to be an
objective, impartial, unbiased social scientific
description of a process or trend bringing about social
change. It is a partisan campaign slogan which is meant
to serve as a weapon to beat down the opposition in
debates over social policy. The way the phrase is
applied by the Senator and his allies is highly
selective; if all the examples that fit the phrase's
formulation were enumerated, its political impact as a
"vote getter" would be blunted, if not entirely lost.
Furthermore, if more people became aware of its
opposite, "defining deviancy up," then "defining
deviancy down" would be exposed as a misleading, one-
sided, unidirectional mischaracterization of the
contemporary social and political scene.

A. Senator Moynihan's Argument

Moynihan's (1993) argument, put forward in his
article, "Defining Deviancy Down," was summarized in
its subtitle, "How We've Become Accustomed To Alarming
Levels Of Crime And Destructive Behavior." Moynihan
puts forward the thesis that, "...over the past
generation, the amount of deviant behavior in American [End page 100]
society has increased beyond the levels the community
can 'afford to recognize' and that, accordingly, we
have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much
conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly
raising the 'normal' level in categories where behavior
is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This
redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders
of 'old' standards, and accounts for much of the
present 'cultural war' such as proclaimed by many at
the 1992 Republican National Convention."

Moynihan (1993) offers a simple typology with
three "categories of redefinition." The first is
"altruistic" redefinition by "good people who try to do
good," however unavailing in the end. He illustrates
this tendency by recounting the deinstitutionalization
of mental patients, who now roam the streets and don't
get the care they need. The second type,
"opportunistic" redefinition, Moynihan identifies as
allowing deviancy to grow in order to justify a
transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who
control the deviant population. Interest groups develop
strategies to redefine the behavior in question as "not
all that deviant, really." To illustrate this type of
"defining deviancy down," Moynihan raises the issue
with which he has long been identified, the increase in
the percentage of children born in the United States to
families headed by an unmarried mother. The third, and
most relevant to criminologists and criminal justice
practitioners, is the "normalizing" redefinition which
Moynihan likens to psychological denial. He draws on
the work of sociologist Kai Erikson (who applied Emile
Durkheim's insights about deviancy) to derive the
proposition that "the number of deviant offenders a
community can afford to recognize is likely to remain
stable over time."

Moynihan quotes from his own article in the
magazine "America" (1965), in which he predicted that a
community that allows a large number of young men to
grow up in "broken families" dominated by women is
asking for chaos. "Crime, violence, unrest,
unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure"
has come to pass, just as he warned, and yet the
public's response is curiously passive. Although the
crime problem from time to time is at or near the top
of opinion polls as a matter of public concern,
Moynihan cites a judge's observation that "the
slaughter of the innocents marches unabated." Since
there is no expectation that things will change, in
effect, the crime level has been normalized. To clinch
this point, Moynihan cites news media coverage to show [End page 101]
how incidents of mass murder today routinely exceed the
death toll of the notorious St. Valentine's Day
massacre of four gangsters in 1929, and how the
shooting of a teacher is normalized when it is called
the "first" of the current semester, implying that more
will follow. The senator concludes his article with
these political characterizations: Liberals have
traditionally been alert for upward redefining that
does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been
correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that
weakens societal standards. Given the manifest decline
of the American civic order, too many people are
getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for
a society; more people should become alarmed at the
"trivialization of the high crime rate."

B. Mainstreaming Moynihan's Terminology

After his ideas appeared in the Winter, 1993 issue
of the American Scholar, the entire article was
reprinted in the Winter 1993 issue of the American
Educator, a magazine sent out [free] to teachers and
professors affiliated with the American Federation of
Teachers. Soon thereafter, his phrase started to show
up in the criminal justice vocabulary of popular
culture. The following examples show how quickly the
expression was picked up and mainstreamed into popular
culture, and how rapidly it entered the political fray
(at least in the New York City area):

1) The editors of the New York Times (1994) used
the phrase to condemn the Mayor's interference
in the running of the city's public radio
station.

2) The Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal (1994)
illustrated the term by pointing to cops who
don't arrest brazen street level drug sellers
and judges who preside over plea bargains in
murder cases.

3) The editors of the New York Post (1994)
employed the term while praising the police
department's arresting of homeless men who
clean car windshields.

4) New York's Mayor Giuliani (1994) used the term
to explain why he ordered the police to go
after these "squeegee pests" who allegedly
urinate in public and spit at those who don't
pay them. [End page 102]

5) New York's former Mayor Koch (1994) cited the
acceptance of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam
as an example of "defining deviancy down."

C. The Policy Implications Of The Senator's Argument

Senator Moynihan offers no plan of action other
than replacing indifference and resignation with
outrage. As he notes in his concluding paragraphs, his
fellow members of Congress are engaged in a kind of
competition to think up new offenses that merit
execution, and thanks to their financial support,
prison cells are multiplying at a prodigious rate.
Since he offers no directions, no alternatives, no way
out, his dereliction of duty undermines the thrust of
his entire analysis. Unless he has fresh ideas, his
strident injunction of "No Surrender!" (the title of
his similar article in the Summer, 1993 issue of the
Manhattan Institute's City Journal) will incite the
same old predictable results: emotional, counter-
productive, excessively punitive over-reactions.
Without a transcending vision of what is to be done,
any calls to arms by Moynihan or others will simply
stir up more of an outcry to lock up greater numbers of
people for longer periods of time. This "cure" is
rather unimaginative at a time when courts are clogged,
jails are overcrowded, and prison construction is
replacing new public housing. Furthermore, this "tough"
talk and "hardline" approach undermines interest and
support for experiments that are underway in community
service, restitution, victim-offender reconciliation,
house arrest, and other forms of intermediate sanctions
and alternatives to incarceration. Demands for a
"crackdown" end up as nothing more than thinly
disguised class conflicts, in which the middle class
rallies "to take back the city" from the underclass.

Evidently, Moynihan's "defining deviancy down" is
the updated 1990s equivalent of "permissiveness," the
buzzword of the 1970s and 1980s that seems to have
dropped out of political parlance in recent years. As
an epithet, "permissiveness" neatly summed up what many
people found objectionable about the way the criminal
justice system allegedly operated. It bestowed
"unwarranted leniency" upon "undeserving" offenders,
granting them second chances (suspended sentences, [End page 103]
probation), short stays in "country-club" detention
facilities, and early release (parole), among other
"bleeding heart" and "muddleheaded" indulgences of
"hardened criminals." "Defining deviancy down" captures
this same disgust many people feel after several
generations of supposed "permissiveness" have taken
their toll: apparently there are "no standards anymore"
and "anything goes." Actually, what Senator Moynihan is
campaigning against used to be denounced by the phrases
"coddling criminals," "being soft on crime," or "moral
decay," and his exhortation of "No surrender" formerly
was called "restoring law n'order."

D. Moynihan's Selective Application Of The Phrase

Moynihan's emphasis on the tendency toward
downward redefinitions obviously has some basis in
truth (Although Moynihan talks of a generation, in his
discussions of mental patients and single mothers, he
refers to conditions that prevailed in the mid 1960s).
He is correct to point out that since the turbulent
1960s, some of the conduct that used to be widely
stigmatized has gained greater acceptance in certain
circles today, and particular individuals who would
have gotten into trouble in bygone days are now largely
left to pursue their own vices. Moynihan provides a
good example: emotionally disturbed people who before
the 1960s would have been warehoused in mental
hospitals now are allowed to wander through the streets
of big cities. But his analysis of why this occurred is
superficial. He totally overlooks the economic
underpinnings of decarceration, an experiment that
gained support at a time when state spending for social
services was sharply cut back (see Scull, 1984).
Furthermore, he ignores the legitimate demands of the
movement for mental patients' rights, their political
agitation, and their court victories. Moynihan's other
major example, unmarried mothers raising potentially
delinquent youths, is more complicated and more
controversial. But again, he fails to address seriously
the consequences of the de-industrialization of the
American economy, especially the shrinking number of
steady, secure, well-paid blue collar jobs with
adequate fringe benefits that previously shored up the
working class male's role as husband, father, and
breadwinner in traditional marriages.

Granted, Moynihan's phrase calls attention to a
trend worth examining: the redefinition of what is
tolerable and intolerable, which has been underway
during the last 30 years, a period of rapid social [End page 104]
change. But why limit the discussion to the rather
short list he provides to dramatize his concerns? Even
more interesting than the examples he cites are the
examples he omits. Perhaps he leaves them out because
mentioning some of these other illustrations of
"defining deviancy down" would undercut the consensus
he is trying to build to fuel the political
mobilization that he desires. For instance, he does not
mention the substantial rethinking regarding
homosexuality. Gays and lesbians used to be much more
stigmatized than they currently are, but Moynihan
didn't dare call for a new intolerance towards same-sex
relationships. In fact, except for condemning out-of-
wedlock pregnancies, he side-stepped the entire issue
of the "new morality" since the "sexual revolution" of
the 1960s. It would be politically unwise to denounce
lovers "living together in sin," young people engaging
in pre-marital intercourse, authority figures endorsing
safe sex, married persons committing adultery, and
women getting abortions.

Moynihan also ignored certain trends over the last
generation involving alcohol and gambling, in which
pointing out how deviancy was defined downward would be
politically unwise. Condemning the de-criminalization
of public drunkenness across the country would remind
people that the old practice of jailing skid row
alcoholics -- "throwing" them into "the tank" to "sleep
it off" -- was medically unsound, class biased, and
downright inhumane. Denouncing the role of revenue-
starved governments in "defining deviancy down" by
legalizing the "forbidden pleasures" formerly
monopolized by organized crime syndicates -- casino
gambling, off-track betting, and lotteries -- would not
go over well during the current "taxpayers' revolt."
And yet, the partnership between state government and
the gaming industry in commercially exploiting non-stop
risk-taking/reward-seeking normalizes a type of
addiction, pathological gambling, that is still widely
defined as deviant behavior.

Moynihan's phrase implies that downward definition
occurs across-the-board. That impression is inaccurate.
Examples of the public's "holding the line" contradict
the belief that these days people are allowed to get
away with things they were punished for a generation
ago. The most striking illustration is the declining
support for the legalization of marihuana among high
school and college students, not to mention their
elders, according to public opinion surveys since the
late 1960s (see Maguire, Pastore, and Flanagan, 1993:
226-227). In fact, as the rhetoric about the "war on [End page 105]
drugs" continues unabated, the government has never
been tougher on marihuana offenders (Schlosser, 1994),
and state and federal penalties for selling and
possessing other controlled substances are reaching
unprecedented levels of severity.

So far, the criticism of Moynihan's phrase has
centered upon the partisan way he applied it. He
selected "politically safe" examples (in terms of their
vote-getting appeal) and omitted controversial and
divisive examples. Now, an even greater flaw in his
thesis looms: the implication of unidirectionality. Not
only did Moynihan turn a blind eye towards examples
that did not fit his theory, he entirely overlooked the
opposite tendency: "defining deviancy up."

The most glaring shortcoming of Moynihan's
discussion of recent trends is that he did not
acknowledge that a countervailing tendency has been
operating within American society simultaneously. Over
the last 30 years, some groups and movements have been
pushing hard to "define deviancy up." If defining
deviancy "down" means ignoring, normalizing,
tolerating, or even accepting behaviors that used to be
stigmatized and punished, then defining deviancy "up"
means discouraging, deterring, forbidding, and
outlawing behaviors that used to be overlooked or
tolerated.

There are many examples of behaviors that went
unpunished in the past but are now subject to formal
social controls, including civil lawsuits and criminal
proceedings. To the groups and movements that fought
for these changes, the new policies represent
improvements and victories (at least on paper, and in
theory; in reality, however, enforcement remains a
problem).

Since the 1960s, the common theme running through
campaigns to "define deviancy up" has been to hold
people of higher, privileged status more accountable
for their irresponsible, dangerous, and anti-social
behavior vis-a-vis people of lesser or subordinate
status. One way to describe the process of "defining
deviancy up" is to note that certain groups of victims
have been "rediscovered." "Rediscovery" refers to a
process through which victims of harmful acts are able
to improve their standing. The prefix "re" in re- [End page 106]
discovery emphasizes that the victimization was known
about for a long time, and was even outlawed ages ago.
But the situation was allowed to fester until these
victims were "rediscovered" by political movements and
the news media, and organized into a movement by
activists and self-help support groups (see Karmen,
1990).

For example, take the plight of children who are
physically abused by their parents. During the 1960s,
what had been called "cruelty towards children" was
rediscovered, and these battered youngsters began to
receive the attention and assistance that they deserve.
Mandatory reporting requirements were imposed, child
protection agencies were given resources and authority
to investigate and bring charges, and court procedures
were reformed to take into account the special needs of
young witnesses. As a result, abusive parents began to
be held accountable for their excessively punitive
measures that were formerly considered appropriate,
even necessary ("spare the rod and spoil the child").
Now, parents can no longer discipline children as they
see fit. Contemporary standards of conduct backed up by
law draw a line between appropriate methods of
discipline and unacceptably harsh punishments.

A similar case can be made for the rediscovery of
indiscriminate and excessive corporal punishment meted
out by teachers against students. Although the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that corporal punishment did not
violate the Constitution, the children's rights
movement and the student movement used lawsuits and
prosecutions to establish boundaries that teachers and
deans cannot cross when dishing out paddlings and other
physical punishments. In both these examples,
subordinate groups (children and students) have gained
rights and now are protected against excessive
punishments dished out by members of relatively more
powerful groups (parents and teachers) who used to
impose their will with impunity but no longer can do
so. Deviancy has been defined up, since what was
tolerable as recently as the mid-1960s is no longer
acceptable.

Once this pattern of defining deviancy up and
rediscovering victims is recognized, many examples come
to mind.

--With the coining of the term "elder abuse,"
senior citizens dependent upon their grown
children no longer have to live in silence and
fear if they are neglected, abused, or [End page 107]

financially exploited.

--With greater awareness of the plight of battered
women, wives no longer have to endure beatings
by their domineering husbands. Now they have
recourse to the legal system, orders of
protection, shelters, pro-arrest policies, and
other criminal justice reforms.

--With the popularization of the term "date rape,"
women no longer have to acquiesce to the sexual
impositions of men, especially on college
campuses. The victims of these sexual assaults
can seek support at women's centers and rape
crisis centers, can bring their attackers before
campus disciplinary committees, and can use the
machinery of criminal justice to pursue arrests
and prosecutions.

--With greater appreciation of the threat posed by
drunk drivers, DUI and DWI offenses are taken
much more seriously these days, and those
injured in crashes can exercise the rights of
crime victims, which exceed the rights of
accident victims.

--With heightened consciousness about sexual
harassment, subordinates no longer have to put
up with the innuendos, lewd suggestions, or
explicit ultimatums made by people higher up in
the organization. The perpetrators of harassment
can be sued in civil court.

--With the recognition of hate-motivated bias
crimes, members of minority groups no longer
have to endure acts of intimidation and
terrorism by bigots from more powerful groups.

--With the expansion by the Supreme Court of the
category of "defendants' rights," the most
dramatic of all the shifts in the balance of
power has occurred. Landmark decisions have
improved the relative standing of accused
persons and of convicts vis-a-vis agents of the
state. The police are not allowed to beat
suspects whom they take into custody and cannot
give them the "third degree" during
interrogations, as they did routinely in the
past; today police brutality is taken more
seriously by civilian complaint review boards
and by judges and juries in criminal and civil
courts. Similarly, guards cannot beat prisoners [End page 108]

as they used to do, without administrative and
legal repercussions. The attempts to hold
officers of the law more accountable for any
excessive use of their legitimate authority to
employ force represents one of the clearest
examples of how deviancy has been defined
upward.

In every one of these examples, abusive behavior
by persons in more powerful and privileged positions
that was considered tolerable or acceptable just 20 or
30 years ago is currently forbidden by law and
punishable in criminal or civil court.

F. The Interplay Between Tendencies To Define Deviance
Upward And Downward In The Future

Moynihan chose to direct all his attention toward
the downward drift of accepting as "normal" behavior
that used to be considered abnormal. He railed against
what he saw as apathy, indifference or resignation on
the part of the media and public. He offered no new
solutions and conceded the likelihood of punitive
impulses in response to his battle-cry, "No surrender."
In emphasizing just one side of the equation, Moynihan
drew an overly pessimistic picture of the decline of
standards and the decay of the moral order. He
overlooked the opposing tendency in American society:
to hold more people accountable for their behavior --
different groups of people, of higher standing and
greater power in most cases. He failed to see how the
balance of power is shifting in a more egalitarian
direction. Harmful behavior by people in positions of
responsibility and trust is not tolerated like it used
to be. Many groups of victims, whose plight was
overlooked and whose needs were neglected, have been
rediscovered. Many people support "defining deviancy
up" when it comes to police brutality, guard brutality,
sexual harassment at work, date rape, wife beating,
corporal punishment in schools, and child abuse.

As Senator Moynihan noted at the very outset of
his article, Emile Durkheim (1966) observed more than a
century ago that "crime is normal" in the sense that no
society can be free of illegal activities, that
lawbreakers serve a function by calling attention to
the line between deviancy and normality and by
providing an internal enemy for law-abiding folks to
rally in solidarity against, and that if "serious"
crime didn't exist it would have to be created. Kai
Erikson (1966) advanced this line of thinking, and [End page 109]
argued that deviance is not a property inherent in
certain forms of conduct but is a judgment imposed by
an audience. The rate of deviation in a community was,
at least in part, determined by the size and complexity
of its social control apparatus, roughly indicated by
the number of its prison cells, hospital beds,
policemen, psychiatrists, courts, and clinics. The
conflict school of thought and labeling theorists go
even further, and develop the relativist argument that
deviance is merely a designation that elicits
condemnation when successfully imposed upon individuals
and their activities by more powerful persons, groups,
and organizations. Defining deviancy upward or downward
reflects boundary maintenance, a periodic process of
drawing the line between tolerable and intolerable
behavior. Stigma contests indicate that redefinitions
are being attempted, and break out whenever deviant
groups fight for respectability and acceptance, or when
the activities of formerly respectable groups are re-
evaluated. Moral entrepreneurs contribute to the
redefinition process by crusading against perceived
evils, sounding an alarm, mobilizing their followers,
and translating their political power into legislation.
The law is wielded as a weapon in the highly
politicized, high stakes game of trying to impose
standards of conduct. The machinery of criminal justice
serves as a formal mechanism for those in power to try
to control the behavior of others, if informal methods
fail to deter condemned acts.

The future remains a battlefield between what is
and what could be and should be, between haves and
have-nots, between those in charge and those seeking to
regain control over their own lives. The result is a
power struggle that takes the form of a cultural war
over America's "changing mores." Social conflicts over
wealth, power, prestige, and privilege are the driving
forces that bring about the redefinitions of what is
deviant behavior and the rediscoveries of victimized
groups. In years to come, many people will lament
loudly that deviancy has been defined downward, and
that "There are no standards anymore; 'they' are
getting away with conduct that never would have been
allowed in the good old days." But other people will
complain quietly to each other that deviancy has been
defined upward, and that "Standards are much too high
these days; people like us can't do that any more
without getting into trouble." [End page 110]